About

In 2006, I was killing time at St. Louis' airport by scanning the racks at the airport book store. I decided to buy a copy of "The Blind Side" -- then just an anonymous book that hadn't been Sandra Bullock-ed into the national consciousness. I started reading it at the gate. By the time my flight landed in D.C., I'd already finished.

So I handed the book off to a friend. And he loved it, and handed it off to another friend. And he handed it off to another.

Fast forward to 2009. I was visiting friends in Boston. They introduced me to a classmate, and he said something strange.

"You're Dan? From Missouri? I think I have your copy of 'The Blind Side.'"

That's when I started trying to figure out how the book had gotten to him. We backtracked, and discovered that the book had been read by nearly two dozen people in five states.

That got me asking another question: if one book could travel this far, how far could 100 books travel?

This project is called BooksAround, and it aims to answer that question. I'm going to take 100 books that I enjoy and send them out to 100 people around the country. Each book will be given an ID code. When someone gets a book, they'll go to our site -- www.booksaround.org -- and register their book's current location, which we'll chart on our national map. When they're done with the book, they'll send it to a friend -- who'll repeat the process.

Every dollar raised will go toward actually buying the books -- to survive the journey, we're going to need some high-quality, heavy-duty covers -- and shipping them out to our initial 100 readers.

And hey: if we raise too much money, then we'll just send out more books. I'm not going to stop at the arbitrary 100 mark. Just seemed like a good place to start.